Using your own medicines in hospital

This page provides you with information about how you or your parent/carer can manage your own medicines during your inpatient hospital stay.

We encourage all our patients to bring in their medications from home. This helps us know exactly what medicines you are taking and means you won’t miss a dose. You can usually use your own medicines brought in from home whilst you are staying in hospital.

Please let your nurse know what medications you usually take at home. They will assess the medicines you have brought in against what is prescribed and check the doses with you. Once this is completed, they will ask you or your parent/carer to sign a consent form, to confirm that you are happy to use your own medicines during your stay.

During your stay, you can choose to manage your or your child’s medicine or leave it to your nursing team. Please let your nursing team know what you’d prefer. Your nursing team can also help you get used to the medicines and how and when to take them.

• You must label all medicines with your or your child’s name, the name of the medicine and instructions on how to give them.
• The medicines you bring in with you will be kept in a locked cabinet. This will either be near your bed in a Patient Own Drug (POD) locker or in the ward drug room if there are no POD lockers on your ward. If the medication is a controlled drug, this will always need to be locked away in the ward drug room. The nurses will give you the medication from the drug room during dosing times if they are not in a POD locker.
• For over-the-counter medication including vitamins and minerals, please talk to your pharmacist to see if you can still use them whilst in hospital.

Sometimes we find that the medicines are not suitable for use or that your medicines need to be changed during your hospital stay. If this happens, these medicines will be returned to the pharmacy so we can safely get rid of them. If you don’t want us to get rid of them and would prefer to take these medicines home, please tell ward staff as soon as possible.

If you are prescribed any new medicines during your stay, the pharmacy will dispense them to the ward and will give you some to take home.

Please let your nurse, doctor or ward pharmacist know if you think you will run out of your own supply during your stay. We can then arrange for the pharmacy to send some more to use on the ward and to take home with you.

For further information please contact Medicines Information:

• Call us on 020 7829 8608
• Contact us on the MyGOSH on the medications page

We are available Monday to Friday, 9am – 5pm.

We work hard to ensure that our information leaflets are accurate, complete and kept up to date. The information is based on evidence available at the time of publication. This leaflet is not intended to replace discussions with your medical team.

Written by: Medicines Information

Reference number: 1125MED0002

Last reviewed: November 2025

Next review due: November 2029